De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Episode 2: Challenges

I’ve done the math for myself. When I arrived in 2004, I thought it was a great idea to go off [island] and shop for food and come back. And very quickly I realized I was spending my entire day in ferry lineups, and rushing from shop to shop, and that I would have to make a heck of a lot of savings to pay for that time, if I was even to think about paying my own time at all… or valuing my own time, because there are other things I could be doing. — Mary Lavelle

I think finding good employees, good committed employees that live on the island full-time, has always been a challenge. I know that when we were looking for a new general manager, I was losing sleep at the thought of having applicants from all over Canada apply to Cortes… and then even if they were a great candidate, knowing that it would be be very difficult to find a place for them to live. — Amy Robertson

In Episode 2, we engage with the less rosy side of business life on Cortes: the many challenges of running a small retail grocery store on a small two-ferry island in a tourism economy. We discuss the yearly boom/bust cycle of tourism; the cost of transportation and the vagaries of ferry service; and the chronic housing shortage that makes staff recruitment and retention so difficult.

We revisit the trying “Covid years” — which were very hard on so many small businesses — and find out that the Co-op did surprisingly well during that period. The reason? More islanders shopped locally instead of going to Quadra or Campbell River. This leads us into a discussion of shopping on vs off island, and the trade-offs. We also consider the impact of climate change: in the summer of 2022, a severe heat wave stressed the store’s refrigeration equipment to the breaking point. The resulting failures were costly in every sense, and contributed to a downturn in revenue for that year. We ask how the Co-op can become better prepared for extreme weather events.